Word and Object: Difference between revisions

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===Vagaries of reference and referential transparency===

In Chapter 4 of ''Word and Object'', Quine looks at the indeterminacies of reference that are inherent to the (English) language system. A term is ''vague'' if the boundaries of its reference are not clear. For a singular term this means that the boundaries of the object it refers to are not clear,; e.g. with the, 'mountain': for two neighboring mountains, it is not clear where the first mountain stops and the second one begins. General terms can be vague in this same way, but also in yet another way,: namely, that there are some objects of which it is not clear whether or not they should be included inamong the referencereferents of the term. For example, the term 'blue' is vague insofar as it is not clear whether or not some objects are blue or green. A second vagary of reference is ''ambiguity''. Ambiguity differs from vagueness in that for a vague term the (boundaries of) its reference are unsettleduncertain, whereas ambiguous terms do refer to clearly todelineated sets of objects; however, there are objects of which they are clearly true ''and'' clearly false of the same objectssimultaneously. For example, the term 'light' is clearly true of a dark feather (''vis-á-vis'' weight), but at the same time clearly false of it (''vis-á-vis'' visual brightness).

Quine also introduces the term '[[referential transparency]]'. Quine wants to make explicit the ambiguities in language, and to show different interpretations of sentences, therefore, he has to know to what the terms in a sentence refer. A term is used in ''purely referential position'' if its only purpose is to specify its object so that the rest of the sentence can say something about it. If a term is used in purely referential position, it is subject to the substitutivity of identity: the term can be substituted by a [[Extension (semantics)|coextensive]] term (a term true of the same objects) without changing the truth-value of the sentence. In the sentence, 'Amsterdam rhymes with Peter Pan' you cannot substitute 'Amsterdam' with 'the capital of the Netherlands'. A construction—a way in which a singular term or a sentence is included in another singular term or sentence—is either referentially transparent, or referentially opaque; a construction is referentially transparent if it is the case that when the included term or sentence is purely referential, it is also purely referential in the containing term or sentence. (Referential opaqueness is not to be taken as a problem to be corrected, however—Quine's goal here is to make clear which positions in a sentence are referentially transparent, not to make them all transparent.)